# Relação verdadeira da implacavel peste, que padece a Cidade de Marrocos, Argel, e outras Africanas, e da grande trovoada, que a 15. de Março do prezente anno de 1756 experimentou a Berberia



**Dati editoriali:** Lisbon, [printer not identified], 1756

**Codice archivio:** 174

**Prezzo:** 700.00 USD

**Stato commerciale:** Disponibile

**Link ufficiale:** https://www.govirarebooks.com/products/relacao-verdadeira-peste-1756

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## Descrizione accademica e analisi

4to (191x136 mm). 8 pp. Woodcut ornament on title and ornamental headpiece and initial on p. 3. “Com as licenças necessarias”; offered for sale “na rua direita do Arco da Graça defronte de huma Cruz, no primeiro andar.” In fine: Omnia correctioni Sanctae Matr. Eccl. subjicio. Unbound. Some light browning, lower portions of the first and last leaves detached, damp stain to gutter. A rare Portuguese news pamphlet on the North African plague of 1756, combining epidemic reporting, natural-disaster narrative, demographic information and an explicit defence of maritime quarantine. Published only months after the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755, the tract belongs both to the history of plague literature and to the extraordinary wave of Portuguese occasional printing generated by earthquakes, storms and other perceived natural catastrophes in their aftermath. The anonymous author begins from an environmental explanation of recurrent epidemic disease in Africa, attributing it partly to extremes of winter cold and summer heat and claiming that plague returned at intervals of ten or fifteen years. In 1756, however, the danger is presented as exceptional because earthquake, drought, famine and a violent storm had combined to worsen existing conditions. The tract therefore reveals an interesting coexistence of climatic and naturalistic reasoning with a providential interpretation of catastrophe. The account of the storm of 15 March 1756 is particularly vivid. A succession of lightning, thunder, torrential rain, wind and exceptionally large hail is said to have caused deaths over a vast area extending from Fez toward Timbuktu, while panic itself allegedly produced further casualties. The ensuing destruction and scarcity are described in deliberately extreme terms: the author reports famine so severe that desperate inhabitants were reduced to eating their own flesh or that of their children. These passages should be read as contemporary reported news rather than verified demographic fact; their rhetorical intensity is characteristic of eighteenth-century disaster relations. The pamphlet then turns to the spread of plague around Fez, presenting estimates of population and mortality and describing continuous religious processions, prayers and sermons. It reports heavy losses among courtly elites and devotes a striking passage to the Jewish quarter, where the greater part of the Jewish population is said to have died and the synagogues to have been left almost deserted. In confessional language characteristic of the period, the anonymous writer contrasts this with the claim that no Catholic had suffered comparable harm, interpreting this as evidence of divine protection. The text proceeds geographically through Bougie, Oran, Marrakesh and Algiers, supplying population figures and estimates of deaths and thereby attempting to give the pamphlet the form of an informed regional survey rather than a single anecdotal report. Equally important is the account of how the information reached Portugal. The final page states that the reports were obtained after an English ship commanded by Jeremiah Butler encountered a Moorish vessel; Butler supposedly had the intelligence written down after reaching Faro, while further details circulated through correspondence involving João Cofre, an English merchant resident in Porto. The tract thus offers a valuable glimpse of the maritime and mercantile networks through which epidemic intelligence, rumour and commercial news moved between North Africa, England and Portugal. The author is also conscious of the distinction between information and rumour. A story that two infected English vessels had sailed respectively for Genoa and Venice is explicitly treated with suspicion because other recent correspondence suggested that the plague remained confined to Africa. This small passage makes the pamphlet especially interesting for the history of news transmission and verification. Its conclusion is overtly political and sanitary. King José I is praised for having ordered Portuguese fortresses and coastal authorities not to admit vessels without quarantine and examination for possible contagion. This is particularly significant in the context of the reorganisation of Portuguese public-health administration after the 1755 earthquake. Laurinda Abreu has noted that the anonymous tract appeared in May 1756, precisely when Carvalho e Melo’s government was strengthening and centralising maritime quarantine, and has suggested that its publication may have helped legitimise those measures. The connection is plausible and historically important, although direct government sponsorship of the pamphlet has not been demonstrated. The work therefore occupies an unusually rich intersection of plague history, Mediterranean commerce, post-earthquake culture, information networks and the development of state-controlled quarantine in eighteenth-century Portugal. Modern scholarship also lists it among the Portuguese folhetos de cordel dealing with earthquake and plague, confirming its place within the ephemeral popular-news literature of the period.

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## Bibliografia di riferimento

OCLC, 26370948; Bibliografia Médica Lusa: Obras impressas em Portugal no século XVIII, no. 245; Abreu, Laurinda. “Power.” In Mediterranean Quarantines, 1750–1914: Space, Identity and Power. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 236 ff.; Imaginários do Mar: Uma Antologia Crítica, vol. II, section “Folhetos de cordel sobre vários assuntos (religião, terramoto, peste),” p. 181.

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